Automation

Management

vMotion

Perform Live Migrations

VMware vSphere live migration allows you to move an entire running virtual machine from one physical server to another, without downtime. The virtual machine retains its network identity and connections, ensuring a seamless migration process. Transfer the virtual machine's active memory and precise execution state over a high-speed network, allowing the virtual machine to switch from running on the source vSphere host to the destination vSphere host. This entire process takes less than two seconds on a gigabit Ethernet network.

Automatically optimize virtual machines within resource pools.

Perform hardware maintenance without scheduling downtime or disrupting business operations.

Migrate multiple virtual machines running any operating system across any type of hardware and storage supported by vSphere, complete with audit trail.

Identify the optimal placement for a virtual machine in seconds.

Technical Details

Using the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS)

The entire state of a virtual machine is encapsulated by a set of shared storage files such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI storage area network (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS).
VMware vSphere VMFS allows multiple installations of VMware ESX to access the same virtual machine files concurrently.

vMotion Training Migration Video

vMotion Across Boundaries and Over Long Distances

VMware revolutionized the concept of non-disruptive, live migration with the introduction of vMotion. With vSphere 6.0, VMware continues the innovation of migrating live workloads by offering new vMotion capabilities that span the boundaries of distributed switches and vCenter Servers. Furthermore, it is now possible to perform a long-distance vMotion of distances up to 100ms round trip time (RTT). The astonishing 10x increase in RTT offered in Long-Distance vMotion now makes it possible for data centers physically located in New York and London to migrate live workloads between one another.

Storage vMotion Integration

VMware vSphere 5.1 and later versions combine standard vMotion with VMware vSphere Storage vMotion in a single migration. This means you can live-migrate an entire virtual machine between hosts, between clusters or between data centers— without disruption or shared storage between the involved hosts.

Preserving Network State

The underlying vSphere host virtualizes the networks used by the virtual machine. This ensures that even after the migration, the virtual machine network identity and network connections are preserved. Since a virtual machine migration with vMotion preserves the precise execution state, network identity and active network connections, the result is no downtime or disruption to users.

Transaction Integrity

vMotion can transfer the active memory and precise execution state of the virtual machine over a high-speed network, allowing it to switch from running on the source vSphere host to the destination vSphere host. vMotion keeps the transfer period imperceptible to users by tracking ongoing memory transactions in a bitmap. Once the entire memory and system state have been copied to the target vSphere host, vMotion suspends the source virtual machine, copies the bitmap to the target vSphere host and resumes the virtual machine on the target vSphere host, thus ensuring transaction integrity.